my thoughts on final fantasy 1997 so far
(spoilers for a game that was released when i was in diapers)
more progress on the finaled fantasys
so i got to the part where they blew up the pillar and everyone died. was not fucking expecting that. what the fuck.
uuhhhhng man i . the thing aabout it is im playing this on my brothers computer and hes been kinda impatient with me to just get on with the story and when the pillar blew up and i was talking about my thoughts on it as a story choice he was like ‘this is still the beginning of the game’ and i was like,,,, how long is this???
(i really am not a gamer, it must be emphasized)
what else happened. uuuhgh i dont rememberrrr
because i was talking about how much i dont like cloud, my brother mentioned that im probably the only one he’s seen play the game be so hostile to cloud. and i was like well how many people have you seen play through this game? and he kinda sighed quietly and mumbled ‘a lot’ so theres that.
also cool new thing i found out, apparently its sePHiroth, not sePiroth. ive been pronouncing it wrong and my brother laughed at me for it. im gonna keep at it tho i think its funny too
uhhhh what else what elseee OH YEAH uh. oh yeah. i remember,, , ,
there was a rather extended crossdressing scene with a leadup that included a sidequest within a sidequest where a completely different character who supplied a wig to complete the outfit,, look, there’s implication that this character is also ‘crossdressing’ because theres no way 30 year old game is going to be normal about trans women, it was all played for laughs because of course it would be…
im not sure how any of this has aged in the popular conciousness, but my brother said that they didnt cut it from the remake, and i dont know if ive heard of people calling to boycott the remake, but i havent been in the discourse of this series? i dont know, i should ask a transfem who knows what theyre talking about, and until then im not gonna speculate any further.
what else happened…aeris is the last of the ‘ancients’ huh? the flahback sequence was really well done for what tech they had back then, not really sure where this plot beat is going but im not hostile to it. yet.
anything else… ‘the Turks’ is a wild name for what my brother described as “this universe’s CIA but if they were compitent.” Dont know what he means by that, i guess its spoilers. But like,, is this a racist digehistle, or dud they just pick a random word that sounded cool and didnt think of the implications? i have no idea.
the next storybeat is gonna be locating aeris, so i wonder if thats gonna go catastrophically sideways? i dont know, anything could happen at this point. i should go to sleep soon.
progress continues
stopped just as the party broke out of the shinra building, just saved on the world map for the first time. how the fuck is the game still going
brother just told me that we’re starting his favorite part of the game next session, but he’s worried i wont like it because i still hate cloud. i told him “if cloud grows and changes as a person i might like him better” and he just kinda sucked in a breath and went “ehhhhh”
thoughts on the story. i could not stop laughing at cloud busting out of the shinra building driving down the stairs in a motorcycle. hype moments and aura lets fucking go
the motorcycle chase was jank as fuck but imagining that shit on a game console thirty fucking years ago, HOW the fuck did they do that
i burned like 3 hi-potions on the fight with that kaiba lookin mfr that leaves on a helicopter bc i put all my items on the b-team. frustrating fight bc it was just kind of an endurance test and his weird cat just kept raising his defense like an asshole, and i couldnt even aim to hit the cat it just kept defaulting to the guy
the fight i REALLY loved was the elevator fight, the staging was awesome and the restraint that the boss couldnt be hit with melee made sense. since everybody had materia on them that fight went a bit faster. go b-team!!!!!!
the fucking,,, the part where sepiroth busted out and there was a huge hole in the lab and there were blood trails everywhere leading up to the reveal that he’d stabbed the boss of shinra, that was my favorite part so far, thats how you build up a scary future fight
least favorite part was that janky climbing section where i had to get the timing on the rope section of that battery puzzle. twice. i was ready to put the controller down wtf was that
anything else uhhhh…oh yeah NOBODY EVER TOLD ME THAT THERES RANDOMLY SOMEONES EDGY LION KING OC IN THE MAIN PARTY??? WHAT IN THE DEVIANTART FURRY ADOPTABLE IS GOING ON THERE
I renamed him from Red XIIII to Red Dead bc i thought it’d be funny. i miss making breaking bad jokes with jessie……..
technically there was progression today. but uhh
okay so towards the end of the session my brother had me chasing after yuppie in the woods but she took like a half hour to appear so the whole time i genuinely thought that he was having me grind stupid forest enemies in the wrong area. i got so bored that he just took the controller for a while and kept getting more frustrated as she continueed not to show up until FINALLY. she appeared and i was blown away that she atually existed.
so i hate her now bc even though my brother had all the steps to make sure she didnt steal all our money she still managed to troll us. so now in my game file she’s named yuppie 67
when i me tioned to my brother that the first joke that came to mind was ‘yuppie the vampire slayer’ he told me that theres gonna be a vampire dude later in the game that ppl ship with her and now he thinks that might have genuinely been the origin of the name. i fucking hate it heere i dont wanna play this game anymore
what else hsppened. fucking. splepirith. sepoy. sepiroth. that fucker. back to back two iconic memes that ive seen everywhere. ohhhhh look at me im in the fire im so mysterious. ohhh wowwww did sepiroth kill the snake thats at level 26 wowwwww this sure does make me wanna suck his dick and talk about how he has an eight pack hes fucking shredded. did you know he has mommy issues. did you know the bishie anime war criminal has mommy issues. he killed all those people because hes sad about his mommy arent you sad dont you feel sad about the war criminal with mommy issues dont you wanna suck the dick of a war criminal with mommy issues i hope everyone dies ive been grinding in the forest for 30 minutes for fucking YUPPIE THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. SHES FOREVER YUPPIE 67 I CANT CHANGE IT FUCK EVERYONE IN THIS GAME
the chocobos were funny. they did a funny dance. i dont care about any of the human characters anymore i just wanna stay in chocobo farm forever.
dont do any of that mandela effect shit to me her name is literally yuppie. dont ‘yuffie’ me im gonna hit you with Matra Magic (the in-game animation is a bunch of missiles for some reason)
we crossed the sea, and stopped at the new town. the parade section really dragged on, i wish there werent so many janky minigames. why did the game force me to give an unconcious girl mouth to mouth resuscitation? i hated that, and the janky minigame made it worse.
my brother and i had a talk about game length and filler, he said that clair obscure made him used to the 3 person party format so he wasnt thrown off like i was. i still feel really restricted in the 3 person party, and im kinda sad that it cant be remedied, but its not a dealbreaker for the game overall.
brother also apparently doesnt like deltarune bc in his words ‘its five games put into one, and all five games are slightly worse’. he also doesnt like the remake bc its bloated and ‘lighthearted’ and after he showed me a few funny out if context clips and a weird sandwich (you eat the whole thing in one bite!) he concluded that i was ‘probably the intended audience’.
i argued that i think the original is already bloated and i might have way less paitience for the remake, but until i play it i dont know that for sure.
last thought. Barret’s sailor uniform was really cute. I liked that they pointed that out bc its true. I wish this game was nicer to Barret.
In which i discover that the ‘me? gongaga’ meme is from this series and not kingfom hearts as i’d previously beleived
so! just got done with Barret’s backstory. good lord that was heavy. i could critique it, but i’ll just say it worked in the broad strokes. my biggest sticking point is that i dont think Dyon’s story should have ended with him jumping off a cliff after his backstory is that he survived falling off a cliff. i think he should have lived and i think we should have taken him back to midgar, like barret was suggesting, but i guess thats part of the tradgedy? hahhh…
the whole thing with the theme park was weird and janky, i tried to interact with it but it was just too weird. i paid 100 gil to watch a cutscene of a moglin eat five nuts and fall to his death
also this game gave me a second cat-based party member??? catering to the furry crowd i suppose. why do they keep giving me party members when i can only have 2 in my party alongside cloud
this game…theres a lot to it. Weirdly, I find myself yearning for the familiarity of pokemon, and wanting to graft elements of this game onto a structure that prioritizes absolute freedom of choice like pokemon does. what if pokemon worked like materia instead of just replacing a levelup move? what if pokemon didnt forget their moves as they leveled up? what if pokemon could heal each other outside of battle? stuff like that.
its refreshing and frustrating at the same time. i want to like it, but theres just these moments of sandpaper friction that take me out of it. its good, its not perfect, but theres just so much of it and its effects are so far reaching that i cant write it off as just ‘fine’, you know? its weird.
we now return to final fantasy
so, the sidequest with Red (real name Nanaka) was a cheesy but interesting character cul-de-sac. i can put aside my distaste for a ‘i forgive my absent dad’ story just this once since i like Nanaka. Kinda wish I’d known his name so I coulda named him Nanaka instead of Red Dead, idk if that wouldve changed anything tho.
(unrelated to the emotional beats but The freaky face in the cave that becomes a huge floating skeleton warrior that can be killed by potions was all bonkers and i loved it.)
the session stretched long enough that i got to the city that Cloud was from, and there were freaky robed clones everywhere muttering about the upcoming Sepiroth convention. i hated that. really effective horror, i loved it in that i hated it and i wanted to be out if that creepy reanimated clone town and im so impressed that the game could genuinely spook me.
Sepiroth had another moment. the juxtaposition of such effective horror immediately followed by Seppy Boy’s goofy ass floating around like Nights into Dreams was a bit annoying, but i guess humor was what they were going for, because sepiroth throwing a materia at Cloud and hitting him in the nuts was got the biggest laugh out of me all session.
also, after a really freaky optional boss battle, we meet the guy that Yuppie is apparently shipped with! seems like an overdramatic goth douchebag. well, i hear straight women like that sorta thing, if the twilight series is anything to go by! so, good for her, i hope she marries him and then divorces him and gets a huge paycheck from the settlement that she can run off with for her next moneymaking scheme.
maybe the biggest low point in the session was leaving behind the big red all terrain truck. i wanna keep my sweet ride :( i did stop just before the next dungeon cave story progression thingy so maybe i’ll get it back…? i hope so
how the fucj have i not yet cleared the first disc of final fantasy its been 10 hours
okayyyyyy new least favorite character is Sid from Ice Age!!! Fuck youuuuu sour old bitch who berates the woman he lives with and isnt even married to, i dont want you on my party ever and i wish that cutscene ended with cloud kicking you in the ocean and drowning.
in fact, the backstory with the rocket was dumb too!! shera was in there checking the oxygen, and he cancelled the launch because she’d be vaporized, but then the rocket still fired up its engines and lifted into the air for a bit??? and she’s still alive???? change the script or the cutscene, this needed another draft.
i dont think anything else happened. i explored a cave with yuppie and vincent before i got to the rocket town. that was grindy and weird. vincent got me killed multiple times because his stupid dragon install has a fire move that heals not only the big boss fight but also these random encounters of a singular dragon, so i could only let him loose on random enounters like five large bugs or three worms that make you freeze up while they absorb your health.
i think what im gonna do when i get back into it is have Aerith and Cait Sith with their weapons that hold a bajillion materia and just levelling up all of them. My team is currently Vincent and Tifa and i wanna switch it up a bit.
ok i cleared the first disc of final fantasy.
so. i ended up not having aerith and cait sith on my team at the same time. funny how things shake out.
the thing that nobody talks about in regards to aeriths death is the one immediately preceeding it: cait sith. a character who just straight up betrays the party, reveals himself to be an employee of shinra piloting the drone body from shinra HQ, and only continues travelling with the party because shinra is holding marlene and aerith’s mom hostage. with all that fresh on the players mind, we go through a dungeon maze and have huge heavy storybeats about sepiroths big evil plan, and then for plot reasons someone needs to sacrifice themselves. Cait Sith volunteers, and theres a drawn out faux-emotional cutscene where the cat robot drone being piloted by a shinra employee holding a mother and a child hostage gives a tearful goodbye and sacrifices his explicitly replaceable body to move the plot along. And two seconds after the sacrifice his second body shows back up again to interrupt an emotional scene where sepiroth makes the whole sacrifice pointless with mind control.
and then in the next dungeon aerith dies of a sepiroth stab wound with no leadup. a character you actually want to keep on the squad, will not be coming back for the other two discs. she gets an actual burial, but we never see her again.
my brother informed me that in older versions of the game, aerith would take all the materia and items she had on her. i remember being so confused when i saw all the materia i’d meticulously equipped onto her was suddenly back in my inventory without explanation.
he also mentioned that someone who worked on the game had their mom die suddenly during development, which really shows in the emotional weight they gave to the scene itself.
so like. cait sith’s not-death in this context becomes a scathing critique of poorly handled death scenes, where the character being killed off is already not liked, has too much ‘emotional’ leadup to the death, and the weight of losing a party member is immediately undercut because the guy returns instantly.
another detail is that the forest dungeon being a dried up, fossilized reef that a forest has now grown into, its such a unique theme and its so beautifully realised. i simply couldnt get tired of looking through all the huge shells they were using as buildings. shame nobody talks about it!! because it is such a disconcerting backdrop to the events that play out!!! whhhat the fucjk
oh also my brother said i should probably skip the yuppie sidequest where she takes all my materia. i guess i’ll trust his judgement? idk, right now we’ve gotta head north.